Race and Reconciliation

It has been fourteen years since apartheid was dismantled and South Africa was dubbed “the rainbow nation.”  However, that milestone has not tempered sharp racial tensions that survive there today – divides made all the more evident by recent violence in Johannesburg and elsewhere.  Audrey Brown of BBC Radio World Service is conducting a multi-part documentary on this issue and on the ways South Africa’s varied ethnic populations can reconcile their differences.  Frank and probing, Brown asks South Africans difficult questions.  Is race being used merely as a political tool?  With apartheid still so fresh in the collective memory, how do you get ethnic “rivals” to sit down and engage in dialogue?  How do you move from strong racial identification to reconciliation?  Listen to the first three parts of BBC’s “Race and Reconciliation” documentary to explore these issues.

Is America so different?  Our long affair with slavery may have ended more than a century before apartheid, but that does not mean race is not still a divisive issue.  On March 18, Senator Obama delivered a now-famous speech on the state of race in America, in which he described the “complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.”  He cited gaps in education, income, and employment; he deplored the urban dilemma of “violence, blight, and neglect.”  Most importantly, he elucidated and empathized with the frustrations of both white and black communities.

In large part, Brown and Obama are playing the same role.  They are stating candidly what types of racial prejudice remain in democratic societies that are supposed to be color-blind.  Is pointing out these very divisive truths a step backwards, an admission of the futility of trying to end racism?  On the contrary, there is abundant hope inherent in both approaches.  This hope believes that in bringing bitter, divided parties to the same table, to air grievances and share visions, we can move beyond our superficial differences.  Obama’s call was thus, “Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”

The idea of opening a real dialogue about race and racism is not alien in South Africa.  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission assembled in 1995 was effective because it invited all victims of crimes under apartheid – and all perpetrators – to speak in order to achieve the greater goal of restorative justice.  Only through talking about the racial division and inviting reconciliation are such problems resolved.